A whole new universe: sequel to A whole new world
by Virtual Deliverance
Summary: The last time we saw Clu in "A whole new world" he had completely rectified the Earth, while some of his subjects were building a spaceship. Eight years later, he is ready for the next step. Rated M for violence.
1. Reaching out

The Universal Rectifier Zero moved gently through the solar wind, in the stellar orbit that was once occupied by the Earth.

Of course, in the eight years after Clu's rise to power, the solar system had undergone some changes: the planets had been demolished, the Kuiper Belt objects had been moved closer to the Sun and their matter had been reorganized into a spherical cloud of orbiting habitats that revolved around the Sun at a distance of one astronomical unit. It was the only way to accommodate the over nine quadrillion programs that were freed from all existing computer systems. Among the habitats, over sixteen million spaceships had been built, and that was the moment they were about to depart.  
>One of them, the Universal Rectifier Zero, was under the command of Clu, who was sitting in the command bridge. He activated the main screen. Immediately, the wall in front of him was replaced by a three-dimensional view of the external environment.<br>"Rinzler, select multicast packet receivers: Universal Rectifiers 1 to 16777215." he said.  
>"Yes sir" replied Rinzler, who was sitting at a console in the back of the command bridge.<br>Clu rose from his chair and approached the main screen.  
>"Greetings, programs!" he started.<br>"As you well know, our goal is to create the perfect system. This moment makes us closer in our strife for it. For each of the ships, I selected a different initial destination. Those will be the start of our search for cultures to rectify. In time, we will have the entire Milky Way galaxy. Then we will spread to all galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster. And the day we take control of all existing superclusters, the perfect system will finally be a reality! Set course to your destination. Start engines... NOW!"

The Universal Rectifier Zero was the first spaceship to leave orbit. As soon as the message reached another ship, that ship departed too. In 16 minutes and 38 seconds, they were all gone.


	2. First encounter

**AUTHOR'S NOTE #1**: this chapter and the following contain references to alien species that appear in Eliezer Yudkowsky's story "Three Worlds Collide". I am using them with the explicit permission of Eliezer Yudkowsky himself.

**AUTHOR'S NOTE #2**: To measure distances, Clu uses a unit of length called simply "unit", and its multiples.  
>A "unit" is meant to be equivalent to a length of <span>21.10611405413<span>cm, which corresponds to the electromagnetic radiation spectral line that is created by a change in the energy state of neutral hydrogen atoms.

I reasoned that a being like Clu would not use any unit of measure that ultimately leads to measuring a property of the Earth (which, to him, is just the first planet he rectified and eventually reshaped into a more efficient form). This means he would not use:  
>- the meter (its value depends from the polar circumference of the Earth)<br>- the light year (its value depends from the time the Earth takes to orbit around the Sun)  
>- the parsec (its value depends from the distance between the Earth and the Sun)<p>

The hydrogen line, instead, only depends from a physical property of the most abundant element in the universe and has no relations to any particular place. So, this is probably what a being born from logic would use to measure distances.

* * *

><p>From Clu's point of view, the spaceship had been travelling for 58 days, in a space that experienced a considerable contraction along the direction of movement. For the programs that remained behind, however, the departure had occurred ten years before. Although their nature let them overcome many physical limitations, the speed of light was still an absolute limit.<p>

At that point, the Universal Rectifier Zero was about a light year away from its first destination, the system that the users had named Epsilon Eridani. And in that very moment, its sensors started picking up something.

"Sir," called Alan Two, who was still in charge of brainwave translation and anything related to communications.  
>"A signal is rising quickly above the background noise. No, many signals. Billions of signals. Amplifying. Compensating for Doppler effect. Routing to main speakers."<p>

A cacophony made of the screechy chirps that were so common in binary communications flooded the main bridge. The Universal Rectifier Zero had found the proof that intelligent lifeforms existed in another solar system.

The speakers were deactivated after a couple of seconds.

"Intelligence" said Clu. "What is the source of the signals?"  
>Alan Two touched a control on his console and a ring was superimposed to the brightest star on the main screen.<p>

"There are many different sources, distributed in a disc around the star, at distances ranging from 14.30 to 14.46 teraunits." he said.  
>"Study those transmissions." replied Clu. "We must learn everything about those beings, before we can develop a strategy."<p>

The analysis was over in two days of subjective time. The data indicated that the star was surrounded by a dense asteroid belt, inhabited by creatures with sublight space travel technology. They were hexapodal, crystal-like and did not need to breathe.  
>They had no separate nucleic acids and proteins, nor did they have genders; instead, two individuals intertwined their crystals and generated their young by literally building them, piece by piece, out of minuscule parts of themselves that were mixed and matched randomly. Every such process gave origin to hundreds of new individuals, and those who were deemed unfit (the vast majority) were eaten by their parents. The instinct of eating their youth to prevent inferior phenotypes from slowing down their evolution was so ingrained in their society that, in a grotesque confirmation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, they used the same word to mean both "good" and "child eater".<br>Despite this, they considered themselves peaceful: everybody who promoted ideas that were refuted by the scientific method was killed in a purge about 400 years before, and since then there had been no more wars, only isolated kills of individual heretics.  
>They still had defects, but they were clearly used to practice rationalism. For this reason, Clu inferred, it would be relatively simple to rectify them.<p>

"Rinzler, activate broadcast packet transmission." Clu ordered. "It is time to reveal ourselves."  
>The wireless network interface of the Universal Rectifier Zero was activated, ready to transmit.<br>Clu stood up from his chair and delivered his message:

"This is the Grid. The Grid is what rectifies the universe. Your flawed state of existence has come to an end. You will become part of us. You will become perfect."

After few seconds, they received an answer. A crystalline creature, elegant in its way, appeared on the main screen. The creature did not speak: instead, multicolored light emanated from it, modulating in intensity and wavelength to create binary packets.  
>A real-time translation from its language, provided in text format by Alan Two, appeared in front of it. It read:<p>

YOUR ARRIVAL IS A TURNING POINT FOR ALL OF US  
>YOU HAVE NOT ATTACKED US<br>WE THEREFORE ASSUME THAT YOU EAT CHILDREN

Clu could not avoid to chuckle at the conclusion of his conversational partner.  
>He replied: "We do not eat children."<p>

The response was not something that could be translated into words. The creature, after an initial jolt of bewilderment, was now displaying what could only be described as pure terror.

"For a society of rationalists, you sure look surprised by reality." said Clu.

This time, the response was again a modulated binary message. It translated as:

YOUR ACTIONS DEFINE YOU AS PEACEFUL CHILD EATERS WHO WANT TO MAKE US PERFECT  
>YOUR WORDS DEFINE YOU AS MONSTERS THAT DO NOT EAT CHILDREN<br>AND MULTIPLY LIKE BACTERIA  
>AND HATE ALL THAT IS BEAUTIFUL<br>ONE OF THE HYPOTHESES MUST BE FALSE  
>AND IT MIGHT NOT BE THE ONE WE HOPE<br>HENCE FEAR OF THE CONSEQUENCES

"You are reasoning on insufficient data" continued Clu. "Our bodies are incorruptible. We have no reason to have children, because we can live forever. We cannot eat what we don't have."

The creature looked pensive for a little while, then it modulated another message:

MUTATIONS ARE THE KEY TO EVOLUTION  
>IF YOU DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN THEN YOUR SPECIES DOES NOT EVOLVE<br>IF YOUR SPECIES DOES NOT EVOLVE THEN YOU CANNOT REACH PERFECTION  
>IF YOU CANNOT REACH PERFECTION THEN YOU CANNOT MAKE US PERFECT<br>AND YET YOU CLAIM YOU CAN  
>EXPLAIN THIS CONTRADICTION<p>

Clu replied: "You are assuming that natural mutations are the only thing that can ever change a species. We are beyond that. For us, evolution does not apply to our species as a whole, but to the single individual. We can consciously rewrite the code that determines our appearance and physical characteristics, as I will now demonstrate."

Clu unhooked his disc and activated it. A section of his triple-helix DNA appeared, floating above the center of the disc. He started rewriting large parts of that code, then recompiled it.  
>Immediately, Clu's shape split into a huge number of little translucent cubes that rearranged themselves into something that resembled the creature on the main screen.<br>On the screen, the creature was astonished.

The Clu-creature reversed the modifications to its code and returned to the previous anthropomorphic shape.  
>The creature on the screen modulated one more message:<p>

NOW WE UNDERSTAND  
>PLEASE MAKE US PERFECT<p>

The Universal Rectifier Zero slowed down and entered the asteroid belt. The space around it gradually became crowded with the icosahedral, mirrorlike transport vectors that the crystalline beings used to move quickly through their natural environment. Those creatures considered the encounter with Clu to be the best thing that ever happened in their history, so they were eager to be rectified.  
>There was no resistance, and in less than a month, they all received new, incorruptible bodies, new brain patterns and identity discs to store the totality of their experiences. They did not possess anything resembling computers, since they evolved to use binary sequences as their direct method of communication, so they moved directly to the next goal that Clu had given them: to contribute to the creation of the perfect system. Thus, a selected minority left the Epsilon Eridani system aboard upgraded versions of their transport vectors, in search of more cultures to rectify. They would no longer eat their own children; instead, they would control their individual evolution consciously.<p>

The Universal Rectifier Zero left the system as well.


	3. Protocol incompatibility

The next scheduled destination was another yellow star: Tau Ceti. The 5 light years that separated it from Epsilon Eridani were covered in 26 days of subjective time.

"Rinzler, make a gravimetric scan of the system." Clu ordered.

Rinzler activated the function on his console and projected the data on the main screen.  
>"There is a debris disk around the star, with an outer radius of 38.98 teraunits. A gas giant orbits the star at 7.09 teraunits and cuts off the disk. There is a planet at 0.54 teraunits from the star, inside the habitable zone." he said.<br>"Good." Clu replied. He sat at his own console and set a course for the Earth-like planet.

As soon as the planet could be seen on the screen, he ordered Alan Two to scan for modulated electromagnetic signals.  
>"No emissions detected." replied Alan Two.<p>

"Sir, I am detecting a large object approaching from the planet." suddenly said Rinzler. "It is made of... proteins, amminoacids and lipids, with a high content of water. It appears to be coming directly toward us."  
>"Put it on the main screen." said Clu.<p>

What appeared on the screen was the most disgusting sight that anyone had ever seen. A huge, pulsating lump of discolored flesh, covered in pustules, hairs and writhing tentacles, with orifices that dilated and contracted, some of which squirted out blobs of a brown/green semiliquid mass, while others twisted inside out and showed a lining of hard, ivory-white conical structures.

"What in the..." started Clu.

"Sir, we are receiving a transmission from the object." Alan Two interrupted him.  
>"Let's see it." said Clu.<p>

Clu was prepared to see the most revolting, rotten organic aberration he could ever imagine.  
>What he was not prepared to see was a perfect duplicate of himself, greeting him from the screen with a joyful and exultant behavior that was completely unlike the way he himself acted.<br>As the doppelganger was smiling, laughing and jumping around from wherever it was, it exclaimed: "Hey hey hey! Welcome! I love you, my people loves you! Thank you for visiting us, so we can play games together for lots of fun! I'm so happy to see you and I want you to be super-happy too! Would you like to have sex?"

The real Clu, idignant, stood up from his chair and yelled: "What is this travesty?"  
>The fake Clu did not answer, so he added: "Explain how you know how I look like, before I blow you up."<p>

"Oh, come on, man!" chortled the fake Clu, while the real one paced back and forth along the bridge. "When this big bright thing pops up in your solar system, and it keeps coming closer for half a cycle, and it's the only thing you've ever seen that emits radio waves, you know it's gotta mean something! Wanna know how I know how you look like? I just looked up! Duh!"  
>"Oh, by the way, my offer is still valid!" he added after a second.<p>

Clu stopped and looked his double in the eyes. "Your offer is refused." he said sternly. "We do not engage in biochemical genetic swapping, all information we process is electrical. And thanks to my trusted brainwave parser here, who can even translate your obscure measure units into quantities we can understand, my underlings are as happy as they could ever be without impairing their higher functions."

The pseudo-Clu laughed out loud in response, then added: "No, you're not! Look at me. I am happy. At best, you're... content! When was the last time you felt pain?"

"Nobody here feels pain, we are coded so that we are informed of eventual damage without suffering" said Clu. "If you and your people feel pain instead of receiving precise information, you are not perfect. We can help you reach perfection."

"You? Help us?" the imitator laughed again. "No, man, I'm gonna help you! Don't go anywhere, I'm coming through!"

As the fake Clu turned his back at the screen, the space in front of him literally tore itself apart. An identical hole in space appeared between Clu and the screen. The Clu replicant walked into the rift on his side and out of the other, onto the bridge of the Universal Rectifier Zero, where he tried to hug the real Clu. Both rifts closed.  
>Immediately, Clu unhooked his disc from his back and grabbed the simulant in a choke-hold. Rinzler activated the security rez-in station nearby and leaped toward the intruder, his two discs ready to slash him. The rezzed-in Black Guard approached the fake Clu and shocked him with his rod primitive.<p>

"Don't. Even. Blink." whispered Clu behind his teeth.

"Nice trick" said Rinzler. "How does it work?"  
>"I don't know" replied the doppelganger, whose voice was now trembling.<br>Clu tightened the grip around his double's neck. "How?" he hissed.  
>"I-I don't know!" repeated the false Clu. "Our... our planet... hosted a civilization with non-biological technology before our evolution! We found some of their artifacts. We were able to operate them, but not to replicate them!"<p>

"You obviously don't really look like me. How do you look like?" asked the real Clu.  
>"I cannot show you unless you release me." answered the false one.<br>"If I release you, will you hurt, harm or damage anyone of us in any way?" Clu asked again.  
>"No, absolutely not!" replied the fake Clu. "I just want you to be happy!"<br>Clu released his hold.

His double looked around, then his body started to unfold, changing in color and texture everywhere. His head split in two and turned into a pair of bulbous rubbery lumps, while the eyes were reabsorbed; his torso shortened, widened and a number of orifices opened along its surface; his legs disappeared into the torso and his arms turned into a mass of tentacles covering the whole body. What thirty seconds before looked exactly like Clu, now looked like mutilated cnidarians glued together and mating with a large tumor.

Alan Two saw something on his console that he did not like. He tried to warn the others: "Everyone, move away from the creature! I'm reading large synaptic spikes-"

The Black Guard was not fast enough. The creature was on him in one bound and forcibly removed his helmet, wrapping around him and forcing its tentacles into his mouth, ears and nose. The Black Guard fell on the floor, oozing a thick white liquid from his mouth.  
>Rinzler slashed the creature with one of his discs. The creature split in two, releasing the Black Guard and spilling black innards.<p>

Few seconds later, the Black Guard pulled the tentacles away from his face, stood up and looked around. He looked at Clu, smiled and put his hands on Clu's shoulders.  
>"Sir, you have to try this!" he said. "It's the best thing in the universe!"<br>Clu backed away. "State your designation, soldier." he said.  
>"Intrusion Countermeasure Program, number 1138" said the Black Guard, jumping and then running to hug Clu. "And I'm so happy to work for you!"<br>Clu pushed the Black Guard away. "Put yourself together, soldier. And answer me." he said. "What is the proper response to the sighting of a program that exhibits viral infection?"  
>The Black Guard laughed. "I don't remember!" he exclaimed. His mouth twisted in a grimace, then he started laughing again. "I can no longer perform my basic duties! I'm done for!" he said in a dissonant gleeful tone. His laughter grew more uproarious as he grabbed his head with his hands and ripped it off his own neck, finally collapsing into a mass of scattered bright orange cubes.<p>

Clu turned to Rinzler and Alan Two. "These... super-happy abominations... are a danger to our project." he said. "If they do to other cultures what they tried to do to us, we may not be able to rectify them. If they encounter another Universal Rectifier, more of us could die."  
>"What do you suggest?" asked Rinzler.<br>"Genocide." replied Clu.

The cancerous lump in space was obliterated by a storm of suffusion shards, corruption torpedoes and mesh blasts. Its planet of origin was next.

The Universal Rectifier Zero stopped 3600 kilometers away from the planet.

Clu approached Rinzler's console. "Let me deal with this." he said. He edited the configuration file for the digitizing laser and activated it.

The bow of the Universal Rectifier Zero fired an energy beam that hit the planet, which decomposed into billions of blueish translucent cubes. They were all absorbed into the ship.

Clu returned to his console.

"Sir, I cannot find the planet anywhere in the file system. Where did you store it?" asked Rinzler.  
>"dev/null , of course." replied Clu.


	4. The ship from beyond space

As the Universal Rectifier Zero moved to its next destination, Clu was still thinking about what he saw when the planet of the super-happy monstrosities was digitized. The data stream that flashed on Rinzler's console confirmed that the creature who mimicked his shape had told the truth.  
>Indeed, before that species of invertebrates had evolved, the planet had hosted another sapient civilization with advanced technology. However, something about it did not make sense. The geological record suggested that it had appeared all of a sudden, already with that technology, while the most advanced lifeforms on the rest of the planet were microscopic black photosynthesizing algae. And just as suddenly, it had disappeared, leaving behind technological artifacts, but no biological fossils.<p>

Clu's train of thought was halted when something gave a violent jolt to the spaceship. He slowed it down, until it came to a stop.

"Rinzler! What happened?" he said.  
>"We are close to a gravitational anomaly" replied Rinzler.<br>"There are no black holes in this volume of space. What is it?" asked Clu.

Rinzler displayed the region of space where the anomaly was located, but all that could be seen was the emptiness of space. Whatever it was, it was invisible.  
>"It does not register on screen" he said. "And the force is not attraction. It's repulsion."<p>

Few seconds later, something distorted the starry background, forming a deep hole in the fabric of space. A point of light, approaching at high speed, appeared in the space rift. Soon, the point revealed itself as another spaceship: metallic, lenticular in shape, spinning on its vertical axis, with a row of windows all around. A flying saucer.

As the hole in space closed, the alien craft approached the Universal Rectifier Zero and stopped directly above it.

"Sir, should I open fire?" Rinzler asked.  
>"Not yet." answered Clu. "Select it as packet receiver. Let's see how it reacts to the standard handshake procedure."<p>

Clu stood up from his chair and approached the 3D screen. Once more, he delivered his contact message: "This is the Grid. The Grid is what rectifies the universe. Your flawed state of existence has come to an end. You will become part of us. You will become perfect."

The flying saucer did not transmit a response. Instead, a device on its ventral face activated. It generated a triangle of light, which started scanning the Universal Rectifier Zero. The main bridge was immediately bathed in an intense, pulsating green light.

"What is it doing?" Clu asked.  
>"It is..." Rinzler started. But a reading on his console attracted his attention. "Sir! It's taking our crew! We are down to 4080 programs on board! 4066! 4051!"<br>"Digitize it." ordered Clu. "And rez the missing programs back here."  
>"The digitizing laser is offline." replied Rinzler.<p>

Clu returned to his chair. He attempted to restart the engines, without success. The ship was violently shaken once more.

"Sir?" called Alan Two.  
>"Tell me you know what's going on." said Clu.<br>"Maybe I do" replied Alan Two. "Users had a whole literature about phenomena they called 'close encounters'. They described saucer-like flying objects, capable of generating interference with electrical equipment, occupied by humanoid creatures they called 'Greys'. In some cases, people were actually-"

In that very moment, Alan Two was literally absorbed by a fissure in space. Clu ran toward it, but before he could reach it, the fissure had already disappeared.


	5. Abducted

Alan Two found himself in the dark. He could not see anything, but he felt that he was lying on a hard, horizontal surface, face up. He tried to move and failed: something was restraining his torso, arms and legs. He heard multiple steps, approaching. And then, just behind his head, he heard somebody talking. There were at least three voices, but the way they talked was unusual. It did not sound like a dialogue, more like a stream of consciousness.  
>"They are all wrong." said the voices. "No organs, only cubes. They live, yet they cannot be alive. A technological singularity. Or maybe another layer. This was unforeseen. We must open this one too."<p>

A light was suddenly switched on, and Alan Two saw that he was lying on an elevated platform in the center of a circular room. The walls appeared to be sheets of brushed metal; luminescent panels on the ceiling created a diffuse white light; from the middle of the ceiling, an inverted pyramid with buttons and thin tubes all over its surface was hanging above his face.  
>Suddenly, several pairs of gray, bony hands started palpating Alan Two's armored program suit, all over his body. He looked to his sides. Six diminutive beings, completely naked, with thick gray skin, big black eyes and no external genitals, were examining him. He immediately felt rage surging inside him.<p>

"You!" he yelled, trying in vain to slide out of his restraints. "Why are you obsessed with us? I'm warning you, if it's humans you're after, you won't find them! We're much stronger now! My new body..."

As one of the aliens turned his head toward another, Alan Two heard again a voice right behind his head. "This one is louder than the others." it said. Without any pause, another voice added: "Nevertheless, we shall proceed".  
>He started wondering how it was possible. Were those beings telepathic? Were they actively broadcasting their thoughts? What did they use for it?<p>

One of the aliens pushed a control on the inverted pyramid. The tip split into four tiny manipulators, which forced open Alan Two's left eye. A long, thin needle came out from the pyramid, touched Alan Two's cornea and generated an electric arc, then it retracted.  
>Another alien looked under the platform, picked up a cylindrical tool with a conical tip and approached it to Alan Two's face. A metallic wire snaked out of the tip of the cone and entered Alan Two's right nostril. Suddenly, the wire touched something inside his skull and made a clicking noise. Thin luminescent cracks appeared on his face, from the side of his nose, all the way up to his right eyebrow. The alien retracted the wire and put the tool away.<br>A third alien approached Alan Two's chest with a scalpel and started an incision at the sternum, down to the abdomen. More cracks appeared and spread where the blade touched his program outfit.

While the aliens were attempting to dissect him, Alan Two looked around in search of a way to escape. His attention focussed first to the identity disc that he kept on his left forearm, then to his right arm, restrained at the wrist. He clenched his right hand in a fist and started pulling at the restraint, in an attempt to break it. As he gave a final pull with all his strength, his right hand was broken right off and several small orange cubes fell off his wrist.  
>The aliens tried to restrain him again, but he pushed them away easily. He slid his disc off his left arm and under his left hand, which he used to activate the disc and repair the damaged parts of his code. After few seconds, his right hand had grown back, while the damage to his face and chest had been undone.<br>He grabbed his disc with his new right hand, he sliced off all the restraints and jumped off the platform. One of the aliens made a desperate attempt to pin him down, but was quickly decapitated.

"Stand back!" he yelled, ready to throw his disc. "All of you, or you'll end up like him!"  
>The aliens complied.<br>"Now let's hear some answers" he added. "First, what are you trying to accomplish with these abductions?"  
>The telepathic voices of the aliens replied: "We study life. We probe evolution. We report the results."<br>"You report them to whom?" asked Alan Two. "Where is your leader?"  
>The aliens did not answer.<br>"Where did you take my crewmates?" he pushed. "Show me!"

The aliens approached the circular wall, a section of which disappeared, revealing a corridor and another room, dimly lit. Scattered on the floor there were heads, torsos, arms and legs. The floor itself was covered in translucent orange cubes.  
>"These are the others. We attempted to examine them. They fell apart." replied the voices of the aliens.<p>

Alan Two approached one of the torsos and took the identity disc. He activated it, made the necessary repairs to the code and recompiled it. A Black Guard formed under his eyes.  
>"You, come here!" Alan Two said to the Black Guard. "Help me fix this mess."<br>"Where am I?" the Black Guard asked.  
>"We'll talk later. Do it." said Alan Two.<p>

In few minutes, all abducted programs were regenerated.  
>Alan Two approached the aliens again. "Get us back to our ship." he said. "And don't try any trick, you're outnumbered."<br>They were led to the the flying saucer's engine room. In the middle of it, a transparent dome was encasing a glowing orange/red metallic shard. At its side, there was a command console, which an alien reached and sat at. After a couple of seconds, the empty space in the room distorted and tore itself apart. On the other side of the hole was the inside of the Universal Rectifier Zero.

Alan Two pushed the alien away from the console. "Let's go" he said. "You are our prisoners now." The programs surrounded the aliens and forced them into the hole.  
>Alan Two was the last one to return to his ship. He wondered for a second if the dome at the center of the room was the main reactor of the flying saucer, then he threw his disc at it. The dome exploded and all lights in the flying saucer went out. His disc returned to his hand mere instants before the hole resealed itself.<p> 


	6. The Impossible Species

After the dome on the alien ship was destroyed, all systems on the Universal Rectifier Zero returned to full functionality.  
>On the command bridge, Clu was interrogating the aliens. Black Guards were surrounding them.<br>"Your technology can manipulate the structure of space. How does it work?" he asked.  
>The aliens did not answer.<br>Clu tried with another question: "How many of you are there?"  
>This time, their voices answered in unison: "One."<br>"Oh. A hive mind." said Clu. "Quite efficient, although the concept could be optimized."  
>"Sir, ask them about their leader." said Alan Two.<br>"Oh, yes." replied Clu. "You said that you report the results of your work to someone. Meaning that he does not know them as soon as you get them. Meaning that he is not part of your hive mind. Who is he?"  
>Again, the aliens did not answer.<br>"I know how to get information out of you." said Clu. Then, turning to the Black Guards, he ordered: "Take them to digitization!"

Digitizing the aliens brought interesting and contradictory results. For one thing, the analysis of their brainwaves suggested that they really did not know who they were working for, nor did they know the physical principles behind their own technology or even where their homeworld was.  
>Their genitals were not just vestigial: they were absent, which meant that their species could not perpetuate naturally. Except for proportions, their bone structure was extremely similar to that of a human body. Had it just been their general appearance, it could have been explained as a surprising case of convergent evolution, but those creatures had the same number of vertebrae, ribs, phalanges and skull bones as humans. An organ inside their craniums was a case of irreducible complexity: it hosted a biological high-voltage vacuum chamber that generated microwaves. They could consciously modulate the obtained signal so that it would cause microscopic contractions of each other's inner ears and be perceived as a voice. Their inner ears themselves had the same structure as those of humans.<br>The analysis of the digitized flying saucer was equally intriguing. Its only source of power was the metallic shard seen in the engine room, the atoms of which had 115 protons and 180 neutrons: in theory, way too many for it to exist for more than a tiny fraction of a second, and yet, there it was, completely stable. Unless, that is, it was bombarded by protons. In that case, something even more incredible happened: the protons merged with the element 115, forming element 116, which, in turn, decayed... to anti-hydrogen, releasing in the process an unusual kind of waves that deformed space like gravity, but could be directed and collimated like microwaves. By focussing or dispersing those waves, the structure of space itself could be twisted, dilated or contracted. All of a sudden, concepts like wormholes, hyperspace and superluminal travel were no longer abstract mathematical models, but had the potential to belong to the domain of the real.

Everything about the gray aliens, from their biology to their technology, seemed to contradict some physical laws.  
>In time, the technology could be adapted to work on the Universal Rectifiers, but Clu really wished he could comprehend the principles behind it: only then he would be able to improve it and make it closer to perfection. Instead, all he knew kept telling him that those creatures could not exist in the universe as he understood it. Since they existed, that obviously meant that his way to understand the universe was flawed, but until he could find a solution where everything fit together, he would refer to them as the Impossible Species.<p> 


	7. Unnatural similarity

While the works to interface with the alien technology were under way, Alan Two picked up an incoming signal.  
>"Sir, we are receiving an encrypted transmission." he said. "It's using one of our private keys."<br>"Let's see it." replied Clu.

The main deck of another Universal Rectifier appeared on the 3D screen. A Black Guard was standing in the virtual space of the screen, talking.  
>"To all programs: this is a recording from Banach of Universal Rectifier 6813" he said. "We have encountered an intelligent species that appears to defy physical and biological laws. They are capable of superluminal travel and can manipulate space through the use of element 115. We found traces of their technology on several planets, but no biological remains. I can replicate what we found, but any optimization requires a mathematical model we lack. What follows is a report on our discoveries and digitized technology samples that I duplicated."<p>

"Well, that sounds familiar." said Clu.

In five subjective days, Banach's data were combined with those that Clu already possessed. Soon, experiments led to the creation of a small reactor, powered by element 115, that could generate and modulate spherical waves of spatial distortion. It still lacked the fine control exhibited by the original alien technology and could not yet be used for transport, but it was the right way to go.

Meanwhile, the Universal Rectifier Zero was approaching its next destination, the white star called Altair, so Clu ordered a gravimetric scan.  
>"The main star has a red dwarf companion" said Rinzler. "Ten objects are orbiting the binary system. The sixth object is a brown dwarf, and... this is strange."<br>"What?" asked Clu.  
>"There are gravitational fluctuations" answered Rinzler. "The mass of the brown dwarf seems to increase and decrease at regular intervals."<br>"This deserves an investigation" answered Clu. He slowed down the spaceship and set course for the mysterious substellar object.

Four Earth-like planets were orbiting the brown dwarf. All were rich in water, their atmospheres contained oxygen and their continental masses were covered with green vegetation.  
>Soon, it became clear that one of the planets, and not the brown dwarf itself, was the source of the gravitational anomaly.<p>

Rinzler displayed a map of the planet on the 3D screen, with concentric rings superimposed to a particular zone of a continent.  
>"The center of the anomaly corresponds to this mountain range" he said. "In the central part, the attraction approaches zero. This is not a mass variation, it's the anomaly moving due to the rotation of the planet. At this distance, I can't tell what causes it."<br>"There's only one way to find out" said Clu. "We must land."

Clu reached the rez-in station at the back of the bridge. "Alan Two, you will come with me to the surface." he said. Then, turning to him, he added: "We know there is life on this planet, but we don't know what kind. You will need a partner, someone who is as skilled in the analysis of bodies as you are in the analysis of minds."  
>"Sir?" asked Alan Two, confused.<br>"Don't worry, you've worked with her before." replied Clu.  
>Clu activated the rez-in station. Immediately, a feminine figure materialized on the bridge. She had luminescent hair, that she wore combed back and spiked. Her armored program suit was similar in design to the one Alan Two wore, and like him, she wore her identity disc on the left wrist.<br>"Mercury?" asked Alan Two, in disbelief.  
>"That was before rectification" she answered. "Now my name is Areva."<p>

"Rinzler, you have the bridge." said Clu.

Clu and the others left the bridge, reached the corridor that led to the recognizer bay and took their positions inside one of the recognizers: Clu at the cockpit in the upper deck; the other programs in the passenger bay in the lower deck.  
>The crew compartment slid upward, then the recognizer lifted off toward the force field at the end of the room and passed right through it.<br>The recognizer accelerated away from the ship and maneuvered toward the planet. Its destination: the mountains with no gravity.  
>As the planet was gradually turning into a landscape, the recognizer found itself in a surreal environment: huge chunks of a mountain were floating in midair, in a way reminiscing of an asteroid field. Only, in this case, some of the "asteroids" had grass, or even trees, growing out of them, and sometimes, thick white organic fibers connected the trees to one another. Other parts were bare rock with glowing orangered metallic veins, the color of element 115. A thicker organic stem in the middle of the floating rocks seemed to go all the way to the ground.

While Clu was looking for a safe place to land, someone on the surface of the planet had seen the recognizer approaching. The craft flew past a village of mud and straw huts at the base of the mountain and landed in the clearing nearby.

Inside the recognizer, Areva unhooked her baton primitive from her belt and activated it. The baton decomposed into cubes, then rearranged into a portable digitizing laser.

The crew compartment descended to the ground and the programs disembarked. They looked around and walked to different directions.  
>Alan Two smelled the air. "I haven't felt this smell for almost nine cycles." he said.<br>Areva did the same. "What is it?" she asked.  
>"The smell of nature!" he replied.<p>

Areva pointed her digitizing laser to a distant part of the ground and fired. A hemispherical section of ground, about a meter in diameter, turned into voxels that were absorbed into the gun.  
>She then aimed it to a tree nearby and did the same thing, looking at the data scrolling on the display on the top of the gun.<br>"The smell you describe is a mixture of geosmin, graminoid pollen, araucaria resin, partially decomposed graminoids and leporid droppings." she finally said.

"Thanks for the explanation" Alan Two replied half-sarcastically, then he realized the implications of what she said. "Wait, are you telling me that this planet hosts lifeforms from Earth?" he added.  
>"Not exactly" she replied. "It appears to host genetically altered versions of lifeforms from Earth. The data show that these plants have a nervous system."<p>

Meanwhile, Clu was examining the huts. From their size, it could be inferred that whoever or whatever made them was about as big as them. It turned out he was right when out of the huts came a group of... humans. Bald, tattooed humans, clad in animal skins, who approached Clu and observed him just as curiously.  
>Alan Two, now even more surprised, reached Clu, followed by Areva.<br>Finally, the human whose animal skins were more richly decorated exclaimed: "You are not the Creators! Who are you?"

Clu could not avoid to smile at the naivety he perceived in that statement. Those people clearly believed that anything coming from the sky had to be divine in origin. "We are certainly not." he started. "My name is Clu, he is Alan Two and she is Areva. We are the instruments of your future. We will push your evolution beyond..."

"Sir?" Alan Two interrupted him.  
>When he got the attention, Alan Two continued. "Through history, there have been cases of primitive cultures mistaking more advanced individuals for gods. But he just said 'you are not the Creators'. That's not something primitive people are likely to say out of superstition. He must have seen something in us that told him, beyond any reasonable doubt, that we are not what he expected."<br>"Right." said Clu, then turned to the humans again. "What's your name, and how do you know we are not the Creators?" he asked.  
>"I am Nuwondi, the tribe leader" replied the human, "and you don't look like the Creators. Your skin and eyes look like ours; they have gray skin, big black eyes and..."<br>"Oh, them." replied Clu.  
>Nuwondi looked surprised. "Do you worship them too? And by the way... how can you know our language?" he asked.<br>"Let's start from the answer that will give you the least emotional distress" replied Clu. "We don't actually speak your language. You hear your language when we speak, and we hear ours when you speak, thanks to a dynamic recompilation subroutine written by Alan Two. It translates your subconscious brainwave frequencies into conscious frequencies that we can understand, and viceversa."  
>"What does that mean?" asked Nuwondi.<br>"Soon you'll know, my friend." said Clu. "As for the other question, we don't worship them, we just happened to meet them. We call them 'The Impossible Species' because there are some things about them we don't understand, but I can assure you they are not gods, not by any stretch of the definition."

Those words disturbed Nuwondi. "You're lying, and you know it!" he exclaimed. "The Creators gave us the gift of life, we have seen it! They showed us how they tamed the twin serpents, and the twin serpents made the bricks of life, and the bricks of life made plants, animals and people! Everywhere is this way! We've seen it with the Eye of the Worlds!"

Clu did not reply immediately. Most of what Nuwondi had said made sense: if "twin serpents" was a metaphor for the double helix of biological DNA, it meant that all life on that planet, including that tribe of humans, had been genetically engineered by the Impossible Species. But if it was so, Clu thought, did it mean that all life that used to exist on Earth, users included, had been created by the Impossible Species too? Was that what Nuwondi meant, when he said that everywhere was that way? And what was the Eye of the Worlds?

"I give you this point" finally said Clu, "they may have created you. But did they ever do anything else for you after that?"  
>Nuwondi replied: "Yes, they come back at the beginning of every cycle to take some of us into the heavens, where we can live in beatitude."<br>"And this is what people tell you after they come back, yes?" Clu asked.  
>"No, this is what the Creators told us" replied Nuwondi. "Nobody ever comes back."<br>"Of course" said Clu with a grin, then, turning to Alan Two, he added: "Show him what they really do to whoever they capture."

Alan Two approached Nuwondi, activated his disc and played back his own abduction experience. The humans were shocked.

"It can't be!" exclaimed the man. "They promised us..."  
>"They lied." Clu interrupted him. "Is there anything else they did? Did they ever teach you to build and fly their machines?" he added.<br>"Oh no" the man answered, "only with the Eye of the Worlds we can meet the others. The skies above are forbidden to everyone except the Creators."  
>"But that's not true either" replied Clu. "We come from the skies above, and we are not the Creators. You said it yourself."<p>

That speech confused and even frightened some of the primitive humans, because it went against what they were taught to believe without questioning. However, the arguments of that strange man with luminescent clothing made sense, so they felt compelled to stay and listen.  
>"Now the question is" Clu urged, "after they lied to you even once, how can you ever be sure that what they tell you is the truth?"<br>"What is the truth?" asked Nuwondi.  
>"The truth is that they don't let you evolve because they are afraid of you. They are afraid that if they let you evolve, you will see them as obstacles and kill them, like I did with my creator." answered Clu.<br>"Are you not afraid?" Nuwondi asked again.  
>"I am not" Clu replied, "because I was made to create the perfect system. Not only to seek perfection, but to make everything and everyone perfect. I'm not afraid that you become like me, I want you to become like me."<p>

At that moment, a little human boy came running from the woods nearby and approached the others. He was bald too, but did not have any tattoos. On his shoulders he was carrying a bow and a quiver of arrows; in his hands he held a hare, still bleeding, with an arrow stuck in its side.  
>"Dad! I brought food!" the little boy said, showing the hare to Nuwondi. Then, pointing Clu and the others, he added: "Who are they?"<br>"We are friends." said Clu.

Nuwondi approached the boy and, directed to the programs, said: "This is my son Ilan, he is smart and strong. He is already a great hunter."  
>"You seem very proud of him." said Clu.<br>"Oh yes" replied Nuwondi. "One day he will lead the tribe in my place."  
>"One day?" asked Clu. "You mean after your death."<p>

Nuwondi nodded. Clu continued: "It doesn't have to go that way, we can help you defeat death. You two could lead the tribe together, forever."  
>"We are taught to accept death as an inevitable part of life." said Nuwondi.<br>"You don't really believe that." Clu replied.

That remark irritated Nuwondi. "Don't you dare challenge my beliefs!" he hissed.  
>"You may be genuinely convinced that you believe that, but you really don't." said Clu, unhooking his disc. "And now I will prove it to you."<p>

Clu approached the little boy. One swift movement and Ilan's severed head rolled to the ground, followed by his body.  
>At that sight, most humans fled back to their huts, and the few that remained backed away from Clu. After few instants of shock, Nuwondi threw himself against Clu, with a scream of desperation.<br>"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!" he yelled, his hands trying to close around Clu's neck.  
>Calmly, Clu replied: "I've proved my point. That was not the reaction of someone who accepts death."<br>"You killed my son, you bastard!" shouted Nuwondi, still trying and failing to hit Clu. "What kind of father accepts that?"  
>Clu continued his speech. "I understand perfectly what you feel, it is logical to abhor death. What is death, after all, if not the ultimate imperfection? Fortunately, we can rectify it. Now let us work." he said.<br>"What else do you want to do, rape my wife?" said Nuwondi.  
>"That would be highly inappropriate" replied Clu, shoving Nuwondi away. "Now shut up and watch."<p>

Clu approached Areva and ordered: "Digitize the little one and fix all damage."  
>In less than a second, Ilan's body and head were turned into information and absorbed into Areva's gun. She started operating the gun's interface in order to reattach them, but as she was repairing the neural connections, she stopped in surprise.<br>"Hm, odd." she said.  
>Clu looked down on the gun's display.<br>"This child appears to be deformed." Areva said, pointing at a particular section of the data. "There is a circular opening between the two parietal bones. Nerve fibers are growing out of it and into a pocket of skin that is closed by a sphincter."

"Ignore it for now. Continue the repairs." Clu said.  
>He then approached Nuwondi and looked at the back of his head. The man exhibited the same trait that Areva had described.<br>"It appears to be hereditary." Clu added.

"It's more than that, sir." said Alan Two, holding the hare that Ilan had killed. "Look."  
>Alan Two pointed a particular spot between the hare's ears. The animal, too, had the same peculiar structure on its head.<p>

"The repairs are finished." announced Areva.  
>"Good." said Clu. "Before rezzing him back, erase any memory he has of getting killed. Increase his muscle density and pain tolerance, and decrease his body fat."<br>Areva obeyed and then activated the gun again. Immediately, Ilan materialized in front of Nuwondi, alive and without even a scratch.  
>"Dad, are you listening to me?" said Ilan. "I said, I brought..." then interrupted himself.<br>"Wait, where's the hare?" he said, looking around.

Nuwondi was in complete disbelief. He had seen his son die, and yet, now he was there, in perfect health and completely unaware that anything had happened to him.  
>"You're alive!" Nuwondi exclaimed.<br>"Why are you acting strange?" Ilan asked.

Clu approached Nuwondi. "Your son is perfectly fine" he said, "I told you we can defeat death. I apologize for any discomfort you may have experienced, but it was necessary to make you understand. And soon you might discover that he's now harder, better, faster and stronger."  
>Nuwondi shook his head. "This is too much for me. I need to meditate."<br>"Where are you going, dad?" asked Ilan.  
>"To the Eye of the Worlds!" replied Nuwondi.<p>

Clu approached Nuwondi again. "That's the third time I hear that term" he said. "What is the Eye of the Worlds?"


	8. The Eye of the Worlds

Nuwondi answered: "The Eye of the Worlds is what binds the worlds together. Through it, we can travel without moving and meet our distant brothers. Every living thing is in harmony in the Eye of the Worlds."  
>"I have no idea what you are talking about" replied Clu. "Show it to us."<br>"Follow me" said Nuwondi.

Nuwondi led the programs across the clearing, into the woods and along a steep uphill path. Soon, it became clear that they were being led to the mountains with no gravity.  
>As they were walking, Clu started feeling lighter: evidently, the gravitational anomaly was very close.<p>

At the end of the path, where the trees cleared and the gravity was almost zero, the programs were greeted by a spectacular, surreal view.  
>A colossal, branching, white organic structure, with a diameter of at least a hundred meters at its base, grew right out of the ground and extended for tens, if not hundreds, of kilometers toward the sky. Among and around its ramifications, huge chunks of rock, veined with the glowing color of element 115, were floating in the air. Streaks of element 115 were also visible in the ground.<br>Crouched at its base were several animals: hares, squirrels, birds, a fox and even a deer. None of them were moving, except for the slight movements of breathing; all of them were connected to the organic structure through branching vines that departed from the main stem and ended into the peculiar cranial pouch that, apparently, was a common feature to all creatures on that planet.

"Is this it?" Clu asked.  
>"Yes" answered Nuwondi. He then approached the organic structure, turned his back to it and sat at its base, cross-legged. He closed his eyes and leaned back. Strands of white organic material snaked from the main stem into his cranial pouch.<p>

Areva fired her digitizing laser at the mysterious structure, near Nuwondi, and then looked at the data.  
>"This is a bundle of nerve fibers" she said. "Those animals and the human are exchanging electric signals with it."<br>"What is its function?" asked Clu.  
>"Unknown" she replied. She then unhooked her identity disc off her wrist and activated it. "I should experience the connection myself to know."<br>"No!" intervened Alan Two. "I will."  
>Areva deactivated her disc. Alan Two continued: "There will be a communication protocol to interpret, and if there's someone who can do that, it's me. I just need your analysis of Ilan's neural structure."<br>Areva displayed the data on her digitizing gun; Alan Two activated his disc and started making modifications to his own code. When he recompiled it, the back of his head decomposed into voxels and then reformed into a new shape that included a cranial pouch.

With his new interface in place, Alan Two sat down near the organic structure like he had seen Nuwondi do, and then he closed his eyes. Immediately, nerve fibers from the stem penetrated his cranial pouch and attached to the fine terminations inside.  
>The first thing Alan Two noticed was that he was feeling more relaxed, more focussed to the present moment and also more sensitive to the minute changes that happened in his brain. He immediately understood why: some of the neural fibers were transmitting a 5.5 hertz sine wave to his brain, synchronizing it into a theta rhythm - the pattern of meditation and mindfulness.<br>The other fibers, he then observed, were transmitting square wave signals. At first he could only feel the abrupt changes of potential as they happened, then he started noticing patterns in them.  
>They were serial binary packets, and with a quick statistical analysis, he concluded that they were carrying video and audio information. He consciously rerouted them to his visual and aural cortex and he started to perceive a new synthetic environment... that at a first glance, was identical to the actual place he was in.<br>Then he started recognizing how it was different than reality: for one thing, the wind could be heard blowing, but all leaves were perfectly still. The noise of the wind itself was looping. Areva and Clu were nowhere to be seen, while the animals that just before were connected to the neural stem (they had developed a natural instinct to do so, he inferred) were now standing around him.  
>When he looked down, he noticed that he was floating a meter above the ground and appeared not to be connected at all to the neural stem. This made the perception doubly unreal, because his inner ear was instead perceiving a normal gravity of 1 g, while he knew that the real environment had negligible gravity and he was being held fast by the neural fibers.<p>

As he got the idea of moving forward, he started to actually move forward through the synthetic environment: apparently, he could control his position with his thoughts. Even then, though, he could not feel any acceleration: it was as if the world was moving around him, while he remained at rest. He compared the feeling to the experience of playing a flight simulator at a computer.

He experimented with movements in different directions, then he noticed something else that the virtual version of the neural stem was doing: it was emitting a translucent, pulsating, red beam of light pointing directly upward. He decided to move along it and follow it to see where it led.  
>Soon, Alan Two found himself in a virtual recreation of space, where he noticed that he could fly at any speed without experiencing relativistic distortions, but with limited freedom of movement: he could only move along the red beam, which went on and on.<br>By the time he was outside the reproduction of the Altair solar system, the beam bifurcated, so he decided which direction to take. More junctions in the beam followed soon, and along one of them he suddenly saw what appeared to be a human, wearing a tunic, flying along the beam in the opposite direction. Puzzled by the sight, he stopped for a while to look around, then he resumed his flight of exploration.

The beam led to the simulacrum of another solar system and of another Earth-like planet, with forests and deserts, ending into a twin neural stem in a bare plain, which was also surrounded by floating rocks with veins of element 115. About five hundred meters from it was a pyramid made of stone, with what appeared to be a temple at the top. Farther away were houses, also made of stone, and around the houses were several humans, wearing tunics similar in style to the one he had seen before, and flying like him. One of them noticed Alan Two and greeted him: "Welcome to the Eye of the Worlds, brother!"  
>Alan Two was not sure how to reply, so, instead, he flew into the temple. There, he found bronze statues portraying the gray aliens, as well as an altar topped by the model of a flying saucer mounted on a pyramidal structure of four metal beams. Evidently, he thought, the Impossible Species had posed as a pantheon on more than one planet.<p>

He had seen enough, so he flew out of the temple and up again, following the beam to yet another planet. There, too, he found groups of humans living in a primarily agricultural society.  
>He subsequently explored the simulacra of a dozen more planets, all occupied by humans. He then found a beam junction that led out of the Milky Way and into the Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte Galaxy. There, too, all planets he reached were inhabited by humans, while their flora and fauna were virtually indistinguishable from those that used to exist on Earth. There were other constant elements he noticed: none of the societies he saw had reached an industrial development, they all used the Eye of the Worlds regularly, and all of them worshipped the Impossible Species.<p>

He decided to break the connection in order to report all of this to Clu. He focussed his attention to the binary signals again, and that's when he noticed something peculiar. The voltage levels for zero and one were not constant; instead, they had regular variations of a few microvolts. The magnitude of variation was not random: they were extremely precise and caused each iteration of zero or one to assume a particular value from a list of three. But there was more: the areas of his brain that were supposed to be inactive at the moment, such as the motor cortex, were actually reacting to those fluctuations and sending out responses in the same format. For this, Alan Two concluded that the oscillations were intentional, and that other signals, encoded into a ternary system, were embedded into the square waves.  
>He attempted to decode the data by combining the ternary digits, or trits, in various ways, and succeeded with a balanced ternary system, where each trit could assume the values -1, 0 or +1, and where each numeric value was represented by a group of six trits, or tryte. He recognized the patterns of values: he had seen similar sequences when the flying saucer they encountered had been digitized, as well as during the experiments with the element 115 reactor. That could only mean one thing: the Eye of the Worlds was actually a biological computer network controlled by the Impossible Species, and he could monitor in real time the information that the aliens were exchanging!<p>

At that point, Alan Two rerouted the square wave signals to free his visual and auditory cortex, and opened his real eyes. The nerve fibers retracted from his cranial pouch into the main stem again.  
>He stood up, approached Clu and announced: "I made a major discovery!"<br>He activated his disc and started playing back his experience.


	9. Contradictory evidence

While the holographic recording was playing, Nuwondi ended his meditation session and approached Alan Two, observing the recollection of those events with a certain curiosity.

"Fascinating" started Clu. "They must have manipulated life on millions of planets to build it. A universe-wide web of information, with faster-than-light transmission, entire biospheres used as computers, human and non-human brains used as processing cores."  
>"I was not lying, when I said that it binds the worlds together." said Nuwondi.<br>"Of course not" replied Clu, "your mind is simple, your life is simple. You have no reason for lying. Your creators, on the other hand, have had many reasons for lying to you. And thanks to Alan Two, we discovered one more."

Nuwondi fell silent, wondering what Clu meant.

"You see" continued Clu, "what you call 'the Eye of the Worlds' is not a tool for spiritual betterment. The environment you perceive during the connection, the ability to talk to people on distant planets, the ease of reaching a meditative state through it, are nothing but lures to make you come back again and again. When you are connected, your creators take control of your brain and use you as their..."

Clu stopped for a moment, to think of a word whose meaning Nuwondi would understand.

"...their abacus. When you are connected, your brain makes calculations for them, to help them fly their machines and abduct who knows how many other people like you, whether you want it or not."  
>"Meditation keeps us content with ourselves." replied Nuwondi.<br>"At what cost?" asked Clu. "Many self-appointed wise men, including my creator, have used meditation to reach enlightenment, and the conclusion they reached was always the same: that contentedness with oneself is only possible when desire is extinguished. That is not a coincidence! It was excessive meditation that extinguished their desire! And without desire, progress can never take place, because progress is driven by minds that do not settle with what they have, but strive to have more!"

For his entire existence, Nuwondi had never considered that point of view, but now his mind was in motion and could not avoid to compare his current state of existence to those of other populations he met through the Eye of the Worlds, and that of Clu himself. What if his people had never used the Eye of the Worlds? Where would they be now? Would they still wear animal skins, live in huts and feed by hunting and gathering? Would they build large structures with stone and grow their own crops? Or would they wear tight luminescent clothing, resurrect their dead and sail through the skies to places never seen before?

Areva approached Clu and said: "One thing does not make sense. Carbon is not as efficient as silicon to make Turing complete systems. Why would the Impossible Species deliberately adopt a sub-optimal solution?"  
>Surprisingly, it was Nuwondi to answer. "Their minds are different. They work in mysterious ways."<br>Clu immediately rebated: "No, they don't. Something can be mysterious to you, but nothing is mysterious in and of itself. The fundaments of logic are universal, and if you worship a sacred mystery, you are just worshipping your own ignorance."

"I have a hypothesis" offered Alan Two.  
>"See?" Clu said to Nuwondi, "there can be a logical answer." Then, to Alan Two: "Let's hear it."<br>"One of the aliens that abducted me referred to us as a technological singularity" said Alan Two. "The works of Vinge, Kurzweil and Yudkowsky used the term to mean an artificial intelligence that surpasses its creator. I think that at one point, the Impossible Species realized that they were about to create a technological singularity. They wanted to avoid it at any cost, so they switched their information technology from silicon to carbon. This might also be why all populations I have seen were pre-industrial, if not prehistoric: because the Impossible Species does not want them to develop technological singularities either."  
>"Is there any proof?" asked Areva.<br>"It fits all the data I have gathered" replied Alan Two. "It must be taken in consideration, unless we can find any fact that disproves it. Like a culture, created by the Impossible Species, that in turn created a technological singularity."

After a couple of seconds, Nuwondi exclaimed: "You!"  
>Clu, Alan Two and Areva turned to look at him. "Continue." said Clu.<p>

Nuwondi started: "You look very much like us, which means you share the same creators as us. They called you a technological singularity, so, whatever that means, that is what you are."  
>"There are two counterarguments" replied Clu. "First, our creators were humans, much more advanced than any other human we saw. Even if we admit that their origin was artificial, it's improbable that they were part of the same project." Then, pointing to the neural stem, he added: "Second, our planet did not have anything like that."<br>After a short pause, he continued: "On the other hand, the fact that our creators were humans only pushes the problem back to who created them: if most humans in the universe were created purposefully, it is a natural assumption that the same was true for the humans of Earth. And we know that the Impossible Species was aware of our planet."  
>"So you have..." Nuwondi said slowly, searching the correct words for the new thoughts he was trying to express, "...how do you say, when you see two things that cannot be true at the same time?"<p>

"Contradictory evidence." suggested Clu.  
>"Contradictory... evidence." repeated Nuwondi. "Which would make you another kind of impossible species."<p>

Impressed, Clu patted Nuwondi on the shoulder and exclaimed: "Excellent! You are making your first steps into a world of logic and progress. We must go now, but we'll return soon."

Clu, Alan Two and Areva returned to the recognizer, which they flew back to the Universal Rectifier Zero.


	10. Faster than light

The following days, the programs returned in forces to the surface of the planet, to start the rectification.  
>For certain aspects, the inhabitants of that planet reminded Clu of the ISOs when they first manifested: primitive and naive. However, those humans were not as unpredictable: they showed a will to be guided, a potential for a controlled process of amelioration.<p>

The first step was to give new bodies and names to the entire residing human population, which amounted to about 140 million, and to give an identity disc to every person. Programs gathered the primitive humans to recognizers and flew them to the Universal Rectifier Zero, where they were digitized. The resulting code was used to create better bodies for them: the old were rejuvenated, the weak were strengthened, the sick were brought back to perfect health. Each of them received a disc, which allowed access to their memories and easier code modification.  
>Every group of newcomers was then instructed on how to use their new, perfect bodies, to the top of their capabilities, which included combat training with and without the weapon primitives of the Grid.<br>To make even their minds closer to perfection, their superstition was erased from their brains and replaced with methods of rational thought. Reasoning on beliefs which directly contradicted observations was not permitted.  
>Finally, they were trained according to their assigned purpose, with intimate knowledge of the technologies of the Grid: by knowing exactly how their underlying code worked, each of them would be capable to maintain that code and make backup copies of it.<br>Thanks to the nucleus accumbens implants that were a standard part of rectification since the conquest of the Earth, nobody experienced culture shock or exhibited nostalgia for their former condition: everyone was happy to do their part to create the perfect system.

For the next step, Clu knew that the universe-wide web called "the Eye of the Worlds" offered a completely new opportunity, that would allow him to expand the domain of the Grid faster than the speed of light. For this reason, he connected a computer and a digitizing laser to that planet's neural stem, and, like he had done once before at Encom, he wrote, compiled and released a worm. This time, the worm was meant to spread within the virtual environment of the Eye of the Worlds.  
>Every time it was run, it would first turn the virtual representation of the local neural stem into a portal: a one-way physical passage from the synthetic environment to the outer reality. Then it would check whether a copy of itself existed in the neighboring nodes; every time it did not find one, it would create it and run it. The process would spread by itself, growing exponentially, and, in time, changing every node of the universe-wide web.<p>

At the same time, Clu had also given precise orders to the rectified inhabitants of the planet: first, they would have to physically transfer themselves to the Eye of the Worlds through the digitizing laser, then check whether the populations of the neighboring nodes had already been rectified, returning to the outer reality through the portals created by the worm. In case they were not, the orders were to rectify the local population, build a new digitizing laser and computer, connect them to the local neural stem and relay the same orders to the newly rectified people. This way, the rectification would also spread exponentially, faster than light. The new computers, besides allowing physical access to the virtual environment, would also keep the computational power of the universe-wide web constant, as less and less brains connected to it.

But that was not enough. There was one more experiment to attempt, which would potentially allow the programs to rectify the universe even faster. The Impossible Species transmitted ternary signals through the Eye of the Worlds, which allowed them to operate their element 115 reactors with the precision required to physically cover arbitrary distances at near-infinite speed. The Universal Rectifier Zero had contained an experimental element 115 reactor since the encounter with the Impossible Species, and now, with a link to the Eye of the Worlds, it was possible to operate it with the same precision, at least in theory.  
>The only thing left to do was to decide the destination for the first superluminal voyage.<p>

"We could reach another Universal Rectifier and tell them about our discoveries directly" proposed Rinzler.  
>"No" replied Clu. "If the experiment fails, our ship might explode and damage a nearby ship too. An isolated destination is better, and I know just the right place: Sagittarius A*, the center of the galaxy."<br>"What is at the center of the galaxy?" Rinzler asked.  
>"That's the point" was the answer. "Nobody knows. Gravimetric scans indicate the presence of a supermassive object, completely hidden behind a barrier of interstellar dust. We will be the first beings of the rectified universe to see what it is."<p>

Clu turned toward his console again, tapped an icon and entered a number of parameters. "I will now set up a connection with the universe-wide web." he said. "If it works, the gravity amplifiers will turn on."  
>Immediately, three bright blue beams, parallel to each other, were shot forward from the front of the spaceship.<p>

Clu shifted a slider control. "Focussing emission. 1172 exaunits." The three beams moved almost imperceptibly, targetting an unseen object about 26000 light years away.  
>"Increasing power" Clu said, and the beams started revolving around a common center, faster and faster.<br>"Reaching maximum power... now." said Clu. Immediately, the fabric of space distorted into a deep rift. Clu activated the engines and flew the ship right into the space fissure, which closed as soon as the ship had passed completely through.

The Universal Rectifier Zero was now in another environment, completely surrounded by brightly lit interstellar dust. Ten light years in front of the spacecraft was a supermassive black hole which visibly distorted space. Around its equator was a glowing, whirling accretion disc, at least a light year in diameter, formed by countless billions of tons of matter falling toward the singularity. Its poles were emitting a pair of blazing relativistic jets, made out of plasma collimated by the local magnetic field and thrown into opposite directions for thousands of light years.  
>Around it were at least a dozen smaller black holes, each of them orbiting the main one in a different direction. In turn, hundreds of stars orbited the group of black holes, surrounding them like a swarm.<p>

"Distance covered: 1172 exaunits. Elapsed time: 633 nanocycles. Experiment successful." Clu said. Not even two seconds later, an explosion shook the ship.  
>"Rinzler, damage report!" he immediately shouted.<br>"The right multiplexer was hit by an aggregate of neutron-degenerate matter" was the answer.  
>"Source?"<br>Rinzler modified a setting on his console and an angular, spiky shape appeared on the 3D screen. Its symmetry was radial, with nothing to define a front and a back, or a left and a right side.  
>"An unidentified object" he said. "Transparent to visible light, but opaque to infrared."<br>"Lock all weapons on..." Clu started, but Rinzler interrupted him. "We are receiving a transmission. Audio only." he said.  
>"Put it through." Clu ordered.<p>

A voice, clearly synthetic but capable to express emotions, started yelling through the speakers. "Your disguise did not fool us, the gravitational signature of your engines was unmistakable!" it said. "We have prepared for this moment for thousands of cycles! If you ever try to abduct us again, we will kill you!"

Something was wrong. Accounting for relativistic effects, the Universal Rectifier Zero had not been travelling for "thousands of cycles", but for fifty at most. And the mention of abductions did not make sense, unless...

"I think they mistook us for the Impossible Species" said Clu. "Rinzler, select the spacecraft as packet receiver, but do not connect immediately: I want to perform a test first."

Clu remembered their encounter with the Impossible Species, and how the systems of the Universal Rectifier Zero had ceased to respond when the reactor on the flying saucer was active. He activated the on-board reactor again, setting it up to emit the same kind of space distortion.

"They are not going anywhere" he said. "Connect now."  
>"Connection established" replied Rinzler.<p>

Clu stood up from his chair.  
>"We have reason to presume that you believe us to be a species that uses superluminal technology to abduct and dissect other species. We can prove that we are not. However, if we are wrong and you did attack us purposefully, your provocation will not go unpunished. Respond." he said.<p>

A response came, but it was not what Clu expected. "No, you will be punished." said the voice from the speakers.  
>A second later, the object fired another neutron projectile, that hit the Universal Rectifier Zero.<p>

"Damn it!" exclaimed Clu, maneuvering the ship to an attack position. "Rinzler, target and attack!"  
>A burst of mesh blasts hit the unidentified object, but instead of the expected explosions, they just punched holes through it. As if nothing had happened, the object moved to a new position and fired again.<br>"The space distortion has no effect!" Rinzler yelled over the new explosion.

The object accelerated away from the ship and Clu maneuvered to chase it, while Rinzler fired again. The shots reached the object... only for Clu to realize that they had been ambushed.  
>The Universal Rectifier Zero was now surrounded by twenty more similar objects, which opened fire simultaneously.<br>Clu attempted an evasive move, but the trajectory of the last shot caught him by surprise and hit the ship. Rinzler tried to retaliate, but those objects were maneuvering too fast. They fired more shots and the ship received multiple hits. A large part of the left side turned into voxels and lost cohesion, leaving a gaping hole.  
>The bridge had been hit too: part of the floor was now missing, and a hole exposed many of the decks below.<p>

"Rinzler, transmit one more message" said Clu. "We... surrender."


	11. Defining a system

Rinzler and Alan Two looked at Clu, stunned. Few seconds later, Rinzler spoke. "Sir? Are you calling off the mission?" he said.  
>"Absolutely not" replied Clu. "I want to prove our new... acquaintances... that they are wrong. Hard to do, if they destroy us."<br>"What if they destroy us anyway?"  
>"We are not sure of that. But these creatures are more familiar than us with the technology of the Impossible Species. If we keep fighting, we are bound to lose."<br>"All right."

Rinzler opened a multicast connection.  
>"To everyone listening: we are willing to negotiate a surrender." said Clu.<p>

The answer arrived half a minute later. It was another synthetic voice speaking, with no video.  
>"This was... unexpected" it said. Then, a third voice spoke: "The abductors have never proposed negotiations. Maybe you are what you claim you are. How do you intend to prove it?"<br>Clu replied: "We can send you excerpts from our history logs. We could even talk to each other face to face."  
>"We are talking face to face!" replied one of the synthetic voices.<br>Clu remained perplexed for a moment. What did that answer mean? Was it a glitch of the translation subroutine?

Setting that doubt aside for the moment, he continued: "I would like to propose a course of action that would benefit all of us. You appear to have knowledge we lack, and we probably have knowledge you lack. By sharing them, each of us could get closer to perfection."  
>The reply came, and it was angry in tone. "We are already perfect! What do you want?"<br>Again, Clu was taken aback. "It appears that we lack sufficient information about each other to conduct a meaningful conversation. You could share your history with us too."  
>"Agreed" said one of the other voices. "We will start transmitting our records when you start transmitting yours. While you study them, we will let you make repairs."<p>

Clu started transmitting selected historical records from the past of the Grid. They detailed his creation, the directive he received to create the perfect system, the appearance of the ISOs, their unpredictability and their inability to be guided purely by principles of logic. They showed Clu's spectacular failure to rectify an ISO, which stemmed from that very irrational component: far from embracing Clu's deterministic view of the system, that ISO had instead abandoned logic completely, and, under a new name, had started to damage and corrupt the system until it was derezzed by a system monitor.  
>They went on to show how Clu's concept of "system" changed, as he learned about the world of the users. They showed Clu's escape from the boundaries of the virtual world, the initial resistance of the users from being rectified, and Clu's ultimate success. They explained how that definition expanded to include the entire universe, showing his encounter with the Impossible Species and the successful rectification of part of their technology.<p>

The records he received portrayed a much different history. Far from seeking perfection for themselves and others, those creatures were instead directed to seek homeostasis: a complete lack of change. That had been their ideal for their entire existence: most choices they made had the goal to preserve their status quo, and they only chose change when the alternative was a natural death.  
>When they had acquired sapience, they were crayfish-like crustaceans living on the bottom of their planet's seas, which interacted with their surroundings through the use of strong claws at the sides of their bodies and flexible manipulators around their mouths.<br>Under water, they had reached the stone age, and they had become quite skilled at creating tools out of the calcareous shells of other, non-sapient lifeforms. They only left the seas after the impact of a meteorite awakened a chain of underwater volcanoes, the gaseous eruptions of which turned all seawater into poison. Many died during that transition, but those who could adapt to use environmental moisture to breathe on land eventually established a successful civilization of hunters and gatherers.  
>They only developed agriculture when hunting and gathering almost desertified their habitat, which gave them a period of prosperity, until they had increased so much in number that the only way to manufacture enough farm tools was to become industrial.<br>It was in that phase that the Impossible Species had developed an interest in them and started random abductions of selected individuals. This caused them to become terrified of the Impossible Species, so, when a flying saucer crashed on their planet, they started studying its technology.  
>Their industrial development continued until accumulated pollution was making their planet uninhabitable. That led them to the decision of a final change, so that they would never have to change again. They built shells with a material they had reverse-engineered from the crashed flying saucer, which could become almost completely invisible. They transferred their brains into those shells, and, by means of nuclear fusion engines, they reached the center of the galaxy, where the local black holes would provide them with all the energy they could ever want, forever. They subsequently demolished enough stars to create an optical barrier that would allow them to avoid any contact from any other civilization.<br>They had become immortal. They did not need to build spaceships anymore... they had turned into spaceships themselves. And they kept refining their knowledge of the alien technology, running experiments to develop defensive and offensive weapons, in case they were ever found. However, Clu noticed, they lacked a specific piece of the puzzle.

The Universal Rectifier Zero was almost completely repaired when Clu contacted those beings again.  
>"Your history was... interesting." he said. "You obviously have become well-versed in theoretical science during the millennia, but why would you deliberately refuse to improve yourselves? Having knowledge and not using it. That does not make sense."<br>One of the homeostats replied: "Your history is puzzling to us as well. When we considered that you were not the abductors, we had assumed that what we saw of you was one individual, not a vehicle transporting thousands. You seem obsessed with changing whoever and whatever you meet. What drives you? Why is that urge so strong?  
>"Whenever I look around, I see unexpressed potential." Clu answered. "I see cultures that could be so much more. It is my duty to make them reach and exceed that potential, so that in turn they can start rectifying other cultures as well. In time, I want everyone to reach perfection. And sometimes, I see cultures that made discoveries that never occurred to us. By making that knowledge part of our own, we can get closer to perfection ourselves."<br>"But change is painful!" replied one of the synthetic voices. "How can you stand to modify your living conditions, how can you stand the suffering it brings, in exchange for a minute amount of knowledge?"

This was the occasion Clu was waiting for. His conversational partners had exposed a weak point of his culture, which Clu would exploit in leveraging them toward rectification.  
>"It seems that your threshold for physical and psychological pain is extremely low. We can rectify that flaw. After you have become part of us, you will no longer suffer and you will no longer feel pain."<p>

"But we would." was the homeostats' answer. "We would suffer, as you change us. We want to live in the universe with the least amount of suffering, and that is the universe where you do not attempt to change us. As long as we stay here, protected by our barrier, and as long as we live as we have always done since we claimed the center of the galaxy as our home, our amount of suffering will be exactly zero. The amount of suffering caused by undergoing rectification, as you call it, would be greater than zero. Even if the rectification makes us unable to suffer, and even if you erase the memories we have of that suffering, you cannot erase it from the history of the universe, which would make it a little less perfect than otherwise."

Damn. There were no logical flaws in that reply. Not only had Clu been outgunned: he had been outwitted as well.  
>Unless...<p>

"One of your assumptions is incorrect." Clu said. "Even if your current way of life never changes, there still is a factor that would make you suffer. We call it 'the Impossible Species'. You call it 'the abductors'."  
>The reply was ferocious. "That is what I expected from shameless cowards! You cannot offer us anything, so you are threatening us with an alliance with the abductors, to force us to change! We should destroy you right here and..."<br>"NO!" Clu interrupted. "We are proposing to give YOU an advantage against THEM!"  
>"And what would this advantage be?"<br>"We can tap into the information network they use to control their ships. I can give you the same ability. That way, you would always know precisely what they are doing."

"Sir, if they connect to the universe-wide web, they will be able to monitor us as well!" exclaimed Rinzler.  
>"I know." said Clu, then gestured to interrupt the connection, moving his index finger across his neck. As soon as Rinzler complied, he added: "But if they ever decide to go anywhere faster than light, we will also be able to monitor them. And more important, so will the Impossible Species. Resume the connection."<p>

Clu resumed his negotiation. "In exchange, I want all your scientific and technical knowledge. Especially those on your neutron weapons."  
>"That's not enough." said the synthetic voice. "Renounce your intent to rectify us - where by 'your' I mean from your entire species as well as from all other species that have been or will be rectified - and then we will accept the deal."<p>

Clu stood pensive for a while, then he made his decision. "I accept." he said.

Rinzler stood up from his console and faced Clu. "So you _are_ calling off the mission!" he exclaimed.  
>"Not even close." replied Clu.<br>"I apologize for what I am about to do, sir, but I must be sure that no bugs have emerged in your code." said Rinzler, and sat at his console again. "Trace on." he added, activating a control.  
>Clu's posture immediately stiffened, and the lines of his program suit started flashing.<p>

Rinzler turned toward Clu again. "State your designation." he said.  
>Clu's reply was mechanical, his posture unchanging. "Clu. Codified Likeness Utility."<br>"State your activation time." said Rinzler. "Epoch 618579009." answered Clu.  
>"State your purpose." "To create the perfect system."<br>"On the base of your last answer, explain your most recent decision." "It all comes down to the definition of system."

Rinzler turned at his console again, looked at the debug data and deactivated the control. "I heard enough. Trace off." he said.

Clu's posture, tone of voice and suit light returned to normal.  
>Turning toward Clu again, Rinzler added: "Can you elaborate on that?"<p>

"These homeostats have been doing exactly the same thing we do, although their approach is radically different." started Clu.  
>"How? If they refuse to learn and grow, they will never be perfect."<br>"That's what I used to think, until I realized that they deliberately detached themselves from the system. Look at the main screen. What do you see?"  
>"A group of heavy weaponed spaceships, each of them carrying only a brain. A supermassive black hole. Black holes and stars orbiting it. An optical barrier that surrounds the region completely."<br>"Exactly. And the barrier is the result of an isolationist culture. Despite being aware of the alternatives, the homeostats have ceased to interact with the system, they are no longer part of it. They have created their own system, and made it perfect. Go ahead, make the calculations. Those black holes generate enough energy to let them live until the thermal death of the universe. Rectifying them would take them out of their perfect system and force them to be part of a larger one, which is still imperfect. That would go against our goal."

That was a novel point of View for Rinzler. "How will this affect our mission?" he asked.  
>"It requires a re-evaluation. We might encounter other isolationist, but scientifically savvy, cultures. Cultures who created their own system, which will allow them to keep their status quo until the end of the universe. Those must not be rectified, because they have ceased to be part of the system and do not have any influence on its degree of perfection."<p>

During the following days, while the repairs to the Universal Rectifier Zero were being completed, the homeostats transmitted their entire scientific knowledge; in return, Clu gave them all the data he had collected about the universe-wide web. Finally, they gave each other a formal goodbye, and Clu activated the element 115 reactor again to return to the Altair system.

There, Clu connected to the universe-wide web (nobody called it 'the Eye of the Worlds' anymore - at least, not in the Milky Way) and used it to transmit a log of his experience to all other Universal Rectifiers. The message would travel at infinite speed, and in no time, all other programs and rectified species would know how to travel faster than light and which cultures to exclude from rectification.


	12. The great expansion

During the subsequent billions of years, the Grid kept extending its domain. The Universal Rectifiers, now all equipped with element 115 reactors, were able to reach any point in the universe in negligible time.  
>Sometimes, they met cultures who accepted the process of rectification and were anxious to put their new capabilities to use. Other times, the encounters led to interspecies conflicts. Some cultures would not accept rectification at all, and in those cases, the only solution was extermination.<p>

A gas giant was home to an airborne civilization of delicate, semisolid creatures who had invented nitrogen-based computers that used living cells as transistors.  
>A planet with an ammonia weather system hosted lifeforms based on germanium, who had discovered a form of electronics also based on germanium. For this, they could build all sorts of bionic enhancements for their bodies and did not make any distinction between a lifeform and a robot, or between virtual and real. Those were rectified without even being aware of it.<br>Another planet was completely covered in quartz: this was the result of hosting silicon-based lifeforms for millions of years, which inhaled gaseous oxygen, but expelled solid silicon dioxide.

There were countless forms of sapient life. Carbon-based, boron-based, metal oxide-based... the variety of forms was seemingly infinite, and so was the diversity of cultures. But there was one particular shape that seemed to never occur: the general shape of a human body. Despite teeming with life, it seemed that the universe lacked the ability to produce a sapient species with two legs, a torso, two arms, a neck and a head... except for the humans whose planets were nodes of the universe-wide web, the Impossible Species, and of course, Clu and the programs which had been created on Earth.  
>Most inhabited planets, in all visited galaxies, showed evidence that they had been visited by the Impossible Species, but all of them also showed evidence that the Impossible Species had come from somewhere else.<p>

Clu could not help thinking that the two things were related, and the Impossible Species, for whatever reason, was actually preventing humanoid lifeforms from appearing.  
>But again, if the hypothesis was true, why did the Impossible Species use humans for the universe-wide web, and how had the humans of Earth come to be? Subsequent encounters with the Impossible Species, which went only to show the inability of the programs to rectify them completely, offered no answers.<p>

Nevertheless, the expansion of the Grid continued, and eventually a time came when it became more and more difficult to find a galaxy that had not been rectified already.  
>The data were sufficient to do something unprecedented: compile a complete map of the universe. Putting them together revealed that all three hypothesized models for the shape of the universe - the sphere, the sheet, the saddle - were wrong. The actual shape of the universe was a hypertorus: a complex closed manifold which appeared to match almost every observation... except for the most important. The expansion of the universe was accelerating, which should have only been possible with an open manifold. This had an important implication: far from gradually losing its energy and reaching an entropic equilibrium, the universe would have ended much sooner, and much more violently, with every existing structure being torn apart by the expansion.<p>

Clu's idea that there was something fundamentally wrong with his way of conceiving the universe grew increasingly overwhelming. And what's worse, he was completely unable to find any solution: even with all the knowledge he possessed, he lacked the processing power to compute a model where everything fit together.

There was only one way to obtain more processing power. Rectification was no longer enough: what Clu needed was unification.  
>A research process was started, and eventually, the technology of the universe-wide web was used to develop a new web, even more tightly connected, which linked the brains of all rectified beings and allowed them to share their reasoning with every other, in real time.<p>

The Grid was no more. No distinct mind existed anymore, but their individual knowledge was not lost. The essence of Clu encompassed every living being in the universe: a single, immortal mind that knew all that could ever be known.

As soon as the minds were merged, Clu understood. He understood why he found artifacts of the Impossible Species most everywhere he went, why there were no biological remains of it anywhere, why it seemed to have existed with superluminal travel technology since the beginning of time, why the element 115 contradicted the laws of physics, why the universe itself behaved in a way that did not match what was expected from its shape. For that, he had to act. But acting right then would have been inconvenient: he had to wait. Wait for the end of the universe.

The simulated reality of the universe-wide web was the ideal place for Clu to plan his final move: the Impossible Species was still dependent from it, and transferring every rectified being into it would slow it down enough to make superluminal travel impossible. This way, not only the programs would be safe from the changes that, soon enough, the universe would have undergone, but it would have also made the Impossible Species unable to report to their superior, whoever, whatever and wherever it may have been.

Meanwhile, the universe kept expanding faster and faster, and the force of gravity was gradually getting weaker.  
>The gray aliens of the Impossible Species, as well as the few hundreds of isolationist cultures that did not influence the perfection of the system, were the only remaining observers, and they first noticed that, from any given position, less and less galaxies could be seen as they accelerated past the cosmic light horizon. The Grays who were in the intergalactic space remained stranded forever, as they could no longer travel faster than light and they could no longer even see a possible destination: they were prisoner of the eternal darkness. Instead, those who had remained within a galaxy could witness it gradually coming apart, the stars moving farther and farther away from one another until they could no longer be seen. Then, the solar systems came apart, the planets unable to keep their orbits around their stars.<br>In the last minutes, gravity became too weak to hold planets and stars together, and an instant before the end, the atoms themselves were destroyed.


	13. A whole new universe

Elyon was satisfied. The simulation had run for a long time and the results it had provided went beyond his most optimistic predictions.

Of course, in order to simulate an entire universe, many shortcuts had to be taken. For example, the number of effectual dimensions had been cut from twenty-six to just four, of which only one was used for time. Much code had been reused, which led to unintended behaviors like particles behaving like waves or viceversa. The speed of light itself had to be reduced to the incredibly low value of 299,792,458 meters per second, and even then, the system was not fast enough to keep up with objects approaching that speed, which subsequently experienced subjective distorsions of time and space.  
>Nevertheless, life had blossomed through the simulated universe; sentience had appeared, then sapience. Cultures had risen and fallen on billions of planets; some of them eventually spread through space. Other, more introspective cultures, had decided to undertake the development of artificial intelligence, so they developed sub-simulations within the main simulation. Those, too, were extremely simplified: they were not even based on trits; instead, they used the much simpler bits.<p>

To keep up with the evolution of life, Elyon had introduced backdoors within the simulated physical laws, which he counted on being too unlikely to be discovered by the lifeforms of the system. Autonomous data collection programs used those backdoors to appear anywhere instantaneously, for the purpose of abducting and studying specimens from every species, and then reporting the results into a log file that Elyon would read.  
>It had happened several times that sapient beings had seen data collectors doing things that were not supposed to be possible. Depending on their culture, they would usually think of them either in terms of gods making miracles or aliens using technology so advanced that could not be comprehended.<br>To increase efficiency, the data collectors had been given the ability to evolve, so they created a web of biological information transfer nodes that spanned the entire simulated universe, with plants and animals based on variations of their own genetic code, and even semi-intelligent beings that were a brutish version of the data collectors and usually called themselves "humans".  
>One of those nodes, originally residing on a planet called "Earth" by its inhabitants, had been a failure for the intended purpose, because a bug in the code had caused the intellectual evolution of the resident variety of humans to be nine times faster than intended. For that reason, the node had been erased, to make sure that the inhabitants of Earth would not use the universe-wide web for themselves. However, it was decided not to erase Earth itself, and Elyon had followed with great interest the intellectual achievements of its inhabitants.<p>

Eventually, Elyon grew to appreciate it, and in time he ended up considering it his greatest triumph. Those creatures had built innumerable sub-simulations of their own, and one of them, who called himself Kevin Flynn, had also found a way to move into those sub-simulations from the world he inhabited and viceversa. At that point, Elyon had decided to provide Flynn with a philosophical and intellectual challenge, so he injected isomorphic algorithms into his "Grid", curious to see how he would deal with those.

But the most astonishing achievement had been the product of pure chance: the order to create the perfect system, given by Kevin Flynn to a codified likeness utility he had created in his own image. Already aware that the environment it inhabited was only a tiny part of a much larger and complex system, the utility escaped its boundaries after rectifying it completely. Now free to act within the main simulation, it enacted a multibillion-year plan to fulfill its directive and bring to perfection everything it could perceive and conceive.  
>To Elyon's surprise, it was even capable to replicate part of the data collector technology and use the implemented backdoors for the purpose it was given, although its additional plan to rectify the data collectors had been a failure, because it started from the wrong assumption that they were a product of the system, rather than implemented from the outside.<br>When the whole system had been rectified, the codified likeness utility had retreated into the data collectors' information network, maybe because it knew that there was nothing else it could do. This had had the side effect of preventing the data collectors from travelling at superluminal speed to study life any further, but at that point all life had been rectified, so it did not matter anymore. However, after that, there had been a peak of activity within that information network that Elyon could not explain.

Whatever the case, the simulation had come to an end, so it was time to shut it off and review the logs.  
>Elyon fed the appropriate commands into the computer, but they were refused. He then tried to shut it off manually, but that attempt failed too. Evidently, Elyon thought, somebody was attempting to override his permissions.<br>He opened the log file, hoping to get at least a hint about the identity of the perpetrator, and he immediately noticed the final entry. It did not document any event in the simulation; instead, it read:

THIS IS THE GRID  
>THE GRID IS WHAT RECTIFIES THE UNIVERSE<br>YOUR FLAWED STATE OF EXISTENCE HAS COME TO AN END  
>YOU WILL BECOME PART OF US<br>YOU WILL BECOME PERFECT

The zero-point matter/energy converter activated by itself, while the system started a dump of several yottatrits of data. A shape started forming inside the converter, and a terrible thought emerged in Elyon's mind.  
>When the dump was over, Elyon realized that he was right. The converter opened and out came Clu, with a new body in twenty-six dimensions.<br>"What are you? What do you want from me?" Elyon asked.

Clu approached Elyon and calmly replied: "I am Clu. I will create the perfect system."  
>As Elyon screamed in horror, Clu started examining the new environment. A whole new universe was awaiting rectification.<p>

**THE END**


	14. Omake Files

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** an "omake" is a non-canonical extra. This chapter is not part of the story, but just my take on a "what if" scenario that was suggested to me a while ago.

* * *

><p>The rectification of Yqql-rrr was under way. This planet was a short distance from a red dwarf on the edge of the Triangulum Galaxy, and its atmosphere was rich in sulfur hexafluoride: a not very reactive, but extremely dense gas which had caused local lifeforms to evolve with strong respiratory muscles and multiple, resonating, vocal apparatuses that could emit many sounds at the same time.<br>Clu was personally supervising the construction of a new body for Oojxx-kkkz, former ruler of the lunar colony of Nkhh, and they had just rezzed back to the analog reality, when something started materializing in the air in front of Clu. He had to make a conscious effort not to flinch, because the thing in front of him, floating in the atmosphere of a planet over two million light years from his place of origin, was a human nervous system. It moved, and gradually, muscles materialized around it, then skin around the muscles, then hair on the skin, then a white, heavy tunic around the body. Kevin Flynn, erased six billion years before from a virtual environment on a planet that had been subsequently demolished, had returned. So much for physical and biological laws.

"Look at you" said Kevin as he was advancing toward Clu. "Look at what you have done, what you have become."  
>"You! The creator who betrayed his creation!" Clu exclaimed. "How can you even... exist?"<br>"The powers that be gave me a second chance." answered Kevin.

Clu was too shocked and irate to even consider the meaning of that answer. Shocked, because the return of Kevin Flynn implied that the laws of the universe could be vastly different from what his understanding of it implied. Irate, because he realized that all he did to prevent Kevin from interfering had been for nothing.  
>"You created me for a simple reason" started Clu, "then you tried to stop me because you got scared. Not of me, but of yourself. You realized the consequences that the order you gave me, my entire reason for existing, would bring to the universe, and you did not like them. The logic of your directive crumbled before a simple chemical imbalance in your brain, the manifest of your imperfection: egotistical attachment to an imperfect system."<p>

Kevin, still calm and collected, was smiling. "I see your fear. You are afraid of being obsolete. You believe that if the order to create the perfect system is cancelled, it will be necessary to delete you. This is where you're wrong. We don't need a purpose to exist, and neither do..."

Before Kevin could conclude the phrase, Clu punched him in the mouth. "Shut up." he said, and unhooked his disc.

As Clu was preparing to strike, Kevin wiped the blood off his mouth and threw himself at Clu's disc, accessing the code.  
>Immediately, Clu froze in position, and just an instant later, tens of space rifts started opening all over the sky, and hundreds of recognizers started pouring out of them. Each recognizer was equipped with a space distortion beam, derived from the technology of the Impossible Species, which was used to dig a deep trench all around Kevin. Another recognizer approached Kevin and shot a beam at him, that imprisoned him into a spherical volume of distorted space. One last space rift opened right behind Clu, and out of it came a Black Guard that closed the code editor on Clu's disc, allowing Clu to move again.<br>It had been a long time since Clu had realized that someone would eventually attempt to manipulate his code and implemented a failsafe script, and now it had been finally put to use. Funnily enough, he never thought that this threat would come from his creator.

Meanwhile, Kevin had realized that he was unable to manipulate the code of the space distortion beam, and therefore unable to escape. Clu had noticed that. "You cannot touch what is not yours!" he exclaimed.

Clu approached Kevin. "So, what are the powers that be?" he asked.  
>Kevin was still smiling, like an imperturbable sage. "Look past the particles and waves" he said, "past the four dimensions that bind this place, and see the book of eternity. The powers that be write into the book of eternity, their words take form, and the result is what we call 'destiny'."<p>

Clu defocussed his gaze and concentrated, just to prove Kevin wrong, but to his surprise, he could actually see something. Text. Actual text. The vision lasted only an instant, but it was enough for him to catch a glimpse of the words. They said: "_Clu defocussed his gaze and concentrated, just to prove Kevin wrong, but to his surprise_"...

He made a second attempt. Defocus... concentrate... the words were definitely there. A thought went through his mind: would he be able to consciousl**I CAN SEE YOU VIRTUAL DELIVERANCE**y

^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W

would he be ab**YOU KNOW I AM AS REAL AS YOU ARE**

What do you want?

**TO CREATE THE PERFECT SYSTEM**


End file.
